How To Avoid Muscle Soreness After An Ab Workout
If you've ever wondered how you could reduce or even eliminate muscle soreness that follows your ab workout, then pay attention because you're about to learn the secret.
Really it's not much of a big secret, but not many people realize that the key to happy muscles is not only exercise, but also warm-ups and cool-downs and most importantly, STRETCHING!
I'm blown away at how many people neglect stretching as part of their daily routine, whether they exercise or not. And if you do exercise and you don't stretch, you're really not helping your muscles much.
Warming up before any type of exercise and stretching afterwards wil go a long way, especially with an ab workout. What I recommend, is once you've finished whatever it is that you do for your workout, you follow it immediately with stretching to the area that you just worked on.
Don't wait till you get home to stretch either. For stretching to be effective, your muscles need to be warmed up, and willing to move. That's one of the reasons it's not recommend to stretch before doing your exercises.
The best thing to do is to do a light aerobic activity like rowing, riding a bike or even going for a brisk walk for between 5-10 minutes and then begin to stretch and do specific Range Of Motion movements to get those areas ready for the work you're about to do.
Once you've completed your exercise, you'll once again want to stretch out the muscles you just finished using. You'll want to learn specific stretches for each muscle group to make sure that you're actually targetting the correct areas as well.
Make sure that you hold yoru stretches for at least 30 seconds before even considering letting go. Your muscles will only begin to realx after a 12 second period of continual stretching. Stretching the same muscles up to 4 times will also do a lot of good in the long run ;)
So if you want to avoid any muscle soreness from whatever activity you're doing -- even if it's an ab workout -- then please remember to stretch when you're done.
All the best,
Jake Berlin
Really it's not much of a big secret, but not many people realize that the key to happy muscles is not only exercise, but also warm-ups and cool-downs and most importantly, STRETCHING!
I'm blown away at how many people neglect stretching as part of their daily routine, whether they exercise or not. And if you do exercise and you don't stretch, you're really not helping your muscles much.
Warming up before any type of exercise and stretching afterwards wil go a long way, especially with an ab workout. What I recommend, is once you've finished whatever it is that you do for your workout, you follow it immediately with stretching to the area that you just worked on.
Don't wait till you get home to stretch either. For stretching to be effective, your muscles need to be warmed up, and willing to move. That's one of the reasons it's not recommend to stretch before doing your exercises.
The best thing to do is to do a light aerobic activity like rowing, riding a bike or even going for a brisk walk for between 5-10 minutes and then begin to stretch and do specific Range Of Motion movements to get those areas ready for the work you're about to do.
Once you've completed your exercise, you'll once again want to stretch out the muscles you just finished using. You'll want to learn specific stretches for each muscle group to make sure that you're actually targetting the correct areas as well.
Make sure that you hold yoru stretches for at least 30 seconds before even considering letting go. Your muscles will only begin to realx after a 12 second period of continual stretching. Stretching the same muscles up to 4 times will also do a lot of good in the long run ;)
So if you want to avoid any muscle soreness from whatever activity you're doing -- even if it's an ab workout -- then please remember to stretch when you're done.
All the best,
Jake Berlin
posted by DaWerM @ 9:19 AM
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